More Video
Video popularity has surged past every other form of media, making YouTube the second largest search engine on the web (sorry Bing!). Facebook has gotten on the video train too, allowing users to easily post and view videos from their newsfeed. At any given time during the day you can scroll through your newsfeed and find that a huge segment of the posts from your friends are comments on videos that also auto-play for you to view as well. In 2016 we’re expecting to see Facebook incorporate even more video integration for both personal users and also business and group pages.
Right now you can block individual users from your newsfeed but this filtering capability takes a broad-based stroke where a fine stroke would be better suited for the job. In the coming year we’re speculating that Facebook may offer more newsfeed filtering options, perhaps filtering out specific topics, keywords, or types of posts. With this type of more advanced filtering users could exclude posts about certain news topics or controversial issues from their newsfeeds for a more customized experience. An improved day-to-day experience would make users happy and the associated data would be incredibly valuable to Facebook.
More Effective Ads
Advertising on Facebook kind of already had its heyday and now many businesses are forgoing the advertising route on Facebook in favor of advertising on other social channels like Twitter and Pinterest. Businesses that advertise on Facebook these days tend to see lackluster long-term results, causing them to reduce or eliminate ad spend. In order to bring businesses back and get current advertisers to spend more money, Facebook will need to find a way to allow ads to be more effective for advertisers of all sizes.
Enhanced Business Pages
Business Facebook pages continue to be very popular (in fact, some businesses have Facebook pages in lieu of their own stand-alone sites). To encourage businesses to keep utilizing Facebook, they will have to continue to innovate and offer more business page options. We’re expecting that Facebook pages will start to mirror Google+ pages in terms of available fields and enhanced page options. Allowing verified business pages with rich SEO-related fields will allow them to be indexed better and ultimately make them more searchable.
Greater Privacy Controls
Okay, we’re not actually sure how likely this one is, but with people putting their whole lives on Facebook, we’re hoping that Facebook will continue to provide progressive privacy settings. But being able to control who can find and see the things you post isn’t enough. Facebook also needs to allow users a way to delete information and data from their records as well. The amount of behavioral data that Facebook has access to and stores in absolutely staggering. Responsible collection and storage of this data will always be important and properly sharing data ownership with users is also key.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!